The wildlife garden at Bay Pond Community Nature Hub was the grateful recipient of not one, not two, but SIX great big beautiful bunches of willow withies this week.

I was greeted at the barn this morning by a rainbow of willow; purple, red, orange, green, yellow and brown, all lined up and glistening with the night’s raindrops.

Its destination is our dead hedge (yes, it is likely to be the prettiest dead hedge in Surrey), but the colours were so gorgeous that we had to try taking some cuttings too. After clearing a bed to receive them, we set to chopping the long withies into lengths of around 25-30cm, or 10-12”.  A flat snip below a bud at the bottom, and an angled snip above a bud at the top.  Gardening lore says the angled snip helps falling water to drain off and so the cutting stays healthier; whether that’s true or not, one thing it surely helps is remembering which end is which when it comes to planting the cuttings out!

The new roots of our cuttings will grow from the places where we see buds, so when we took them to our cleared bed, we made sure two or three buds were safely pushed below the level of the soil.  An alternative way of taking willow cuttings is to stand them in a glass of water until they develop roots – the same goes here, make sure two or three buds are below the water level.

This method of taking cuttings works for many woody shrubs and trees. It should be done when the branches are bare; after leaf fall, up until just before bud burst.  It can take quite a while for roots to form, so we’ve put these somewhere they can remain undisturbed for this growing season, and we’ll check on them later in the year – hopefully we’ll have a whole new rainbow rooted and ready to grow.